As CEO of the Paperweight Trust, I have spent the past few years listening to people describe a kind of pressure that is hard to capture in statistics. It is the pressure of doing everything right and still not being able to cope. It is the parent who budgets down to the last pound and still comes up short; the older person who sits in a cold home because they are frightened of the next bill; the family who never imagined they would need charitable support, but now they do.
That is why I believe we have to speak plainly about what may come next. Alongside the human tragedy of war in the Middle East, there is also a serious economic consequence of rising fuel costs already feeding directly into the price of everyday life in Britain.
From where I sit, that is not an abstract warning. It is something I know will land hardest on the people who are already living closest to the edge.
In my role, I see how quickly one increase leads to another. When fuel prices rise, transport becomes more expensive. When transport becomes more expensive, food prices go up, supply costs go up, and the goods families rely on every week become harder to afford. For better-off households, this may mean cutting back. For the families our charity supports, it can mean going without.
I do not write this as an economist. I write it as someone who sees the emotional and practical toll of financial insecurity every single day. I speak to people who are exhausted by constant calculation. People who dread the weekly shop. People who are trying to protect their children from anxiety while carrying so much of it themselves.
There is another hidden consequence that creates a burden for the entire community. That is that the demand on resources of several social care charities is increased by the ripple effect of families just not coping. Family break-up rarely needs much encouragement, and the cost-of-living crisis has been shown to be a powerful catalyst in a family’s decline. Early intervention, employing all the resources at Paperweight’s disposal, can often strengthen family bonds when the causes of the tension in the household have been addressed.
At the Paperweight Trust, we will do what charities always do: respond, support, stretch every resource as far as it can go. But I have to be honest about the limits. The voluntary sector is resilient, but it is not bottomless, and free services are not free to run.
What worries me most is that we have become too used to living from shock to shock. First the pandemic, then inflation, then energy prices, and now the possibility that this war will once again push up costs at home. For the families we work with, there is no recovery period between crises. There is only the next one. And the damage is not measured in budgets alone, but in the anxiety, emotional exhaustion and impact on mental health that come from never having the chance to recover.
April will bring its own blow. For many households, the new financial year will not feel like a reset, but another tightening of the screw, as council tax and water bills rise alongside everything else.
At Paperweight, we are seeing more and more of what we call the “new vulnerables” – people who never imagined they would need help, but who are now finding that stability has become frighteningly fragile. These are not people on the margins looking in; they are people who have done everything right and are still being pushed towards the edge.
As a charity leader, I have learnt that the biggest crises are often not the loudest at first. They build quietly: in empty cupboards, in unopened bills, in the silence of people who are ashamed to admit they are struggling. That is why we must not wait until the impact is undeniable.
And from where I stand, among people already carrying too much, that is a consequence we cannot afford to ignore.
Bayla Perrin is CEO of the Paperweight Trust
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